The following is an extract from a SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE FEATURE on REGGAE SOUND SYSTEMS in LONDON. It was written by COLIN MCGLASHAN and focuses on the interaction between second generation West Indian teenagers and their white counterparts in East London. The full article was originally published in on 4th FEBURAY 1973
'' East London is different. There is a relationship between black and white. You can taste it in Dalston market and not in Brixton and Shepherds Bush. It is not liberal tolerance, not always even liking. It is respect based on similar values: family, toughness, extrovert warmth. In 1968-9, a new generation of black Cockneys threatened to become the East End's trendsetters. In street football games they picked the sides, scored the goals, settled the arguments. It was a time when what was being peddled as pop music might as well have been Beethoven. ' Underground ' music at two quid something an album, freaky lollipop heroes you couldn't admire...it didn't take down the Mile End Road. In the youth clubs, the black teenagers had what the girls wanted: not super-sexuality, but style, social confidence, and music you could dance to. Out of that equation came the skinheads, London's white Rudies: their music was Reggae
There followed a strange period when black and white girls and boys mixed in the East End's clubs and discos with an ease and casualness you could see nowhere in England, perhaps nowhere at all. It seemed almost impossible to use words like ' integration '. Thanks to the adults, it didn't last
English society has always reacted with paranoia to groups of working-class teenagers in uniform - Teddy-boys, mods and rockers, skinheads. It credits them with starting patterns of delinquency that already exist, with alarmist publicity that ensures imitators to make the myth come true. Paki-bashing wasn't new. It attracted attention only when performed by another visible minority. Once it was unearthed by the media, most East End teenagers couldn't get out of their braces fast enough. While the Midlands and Manchester rushed to buy a cherry-reds and Ben Shermans, down in Bethnal Green you could almost hear the hair grow
What followed was London's great Reggae War. Black teenager's suddenly found youth clubs attractive. Starved for years of anywhere of places that would let them in, they travelled across London to anywhere with good sounds. They arrived twenty, fifty, even a hundred at a time. Some youth leaders with near-empty clubs were delighted: most neighbours weren't. Police virtually picketed some clubs and discos at closing-time: mayhem, predictably followed. White youngsters who had been happy with a one-third black minority, found themselves outnumbered: they fled or called in reinforcements of heavies. The game of musical clubs lasted perhaps nine months. Black teenagers wandered round a shrinking circle of youth clubs that played their music, to the accompaniment of clashes, residents petitions, frantic committee meetings. Most clubs chucked their Reggae records in the dustbin. Segregation returned
But the skinheads had changed something. As late as the spring of 1971, you could see the juniors from the Mile End Mob at Sloopy's Disco or the A-Train, wearing West Indian-inspired gear like long open overcoats { a fad taken up by white youngsters around Brixton and translated into the crombie } and stingy-brim hats. They were dancing hesitantly to reggae and American soul numbers with lyrics like '' going back to Af-ri-ca 'coz I'm black '' . Remembering the generations of West Indians whose teachers obliged them to chant '' Bri-tons never-never-never shall be slaves '', those white youngsters presented a pleasantly ironic spectacle
No white kid, one of Britain's leading pop gurus told me confidently in 1971, is ever going to dig James Brown, much too strong.... A month later, James Brown's Albert Hall concert drew a sixty per cent white crowd. The black kids listened decorously; it was the ex-skinheads who leapt up and down and danced in the aisles and rushed for chartered buses for his second show in the East End. A devoted minority of white working-class teenagers haunt the Brixton reggae shops. And at Tiffanys, Mecca's archly renamed palais-de-danse at Ilford, there isn't a black face in sight. But peering through the plastic palm-fronds from the balcony, you can spot the thighs that have learned to move to other rhythms, learned, indeed, to dance to a very different drummer. The DJ plays two Otis Reddings and then James Brown. '' And we're really getting it together down there.... A lot of sex machines here tonight. ''
* The photos that accompany this article are screenshots from the documentary film EXTREMES. They show members of an EAST LONDON BLACK STREET GANG called THE BATTERY BOYS, who were being interviewed alongside their WHITE ASSOCIATES. The film was shot in 1970 and released the following year
